As it happens, there was an occasion last week, when I suddenly felt (out of boredom) that I need to write a poem about a guy that likes to watch the stars. Since the title might imply that this song is boring, I must disappoint you, this is not the case (well, at least I laughed when writing it), and I feel obliged to warn you, that it’s not a song to be read to children as a lullaby.

Uncle Tony watched the stars

Uncle Tony watched the stars,

while out shopping, or stealing cars.

Looking up with an intensive gaze,

his voice was clear, his eyes ablaze.

Uncle Tony watched the stars,

drinking whiskey in classy bars.

Racing ’round in his pickup truck,

with loaded guns, and explosives packed.

Uncle Tony watched the stars,

shooting people, starting wars.

Walking around in his Cowboy attire,

leaving mayhem and a ball of fire.

Uncle Tony watched the stars,

chased by the police in their fastest cars.

With two helicopters right behind,

a ray of hope for the humankind.

Uncle Tony watched the stars,

from his cell, through iron bars.

Heavily guarded in his prison,

will he change and see the reason?

Uncle Tony watched the stars,

his mind unchanged, still wishing wars.

Until the end of the great debate,

to decide upon his sorry fate.

Uncle Tony watched the stars,

on a spaceship, bound for mars.

Where he could see the stars up-close,

he shed a tear, and blew his nose.

He finally got for what he craved,

everyone happy, our existence saved.

Well, looks like you safely battled your way through this unusually large page. Congratulations! I guess you’re probably wondering who uncle Tony is? The answer is quite simple, no-one. At least no-one from the real world. And why uncle? Because it sounded better than “some guy Tony”. Now who is uncle Tony in my fictional world, well… that is to be discovered in some future song.

But it really makes you think, how is such a disproportionate ratio between legitimate comments and spam even possible? Especially when you take into account that most of those spam messages (approximately 60% in my case) are not made by bots, but from real people that try to bring traffic to their own website. I understand that my website is quite attractive for advertising through comments since Time Recursion is a do-follow website, but guys, come on! At least write something that’s related to the post you’re commenting! If you’ll insert your website address in the Website field, you’ll still get the PR juice and if the content of your comment is related to the article I’ll approve that comment without hesitation, you can be sure of that. After all, I’m always eager to get some feedback on what I write.

Yesterday I was suddenly struck by an urge to grab my guitar and play some music. The thing is, my guitar’s at home, so I borrowed one from one of my friends for a short time. It’s funny though, I’ve never felt the need or such a strong desire to play this instrument before. It was always either because I had to practice, or because I didn’t have anything better to do. This time it was the other way around. And it still is, so I’m quite anxious to come home this Thursday and put my hands on my guitar. Might aswell take some time to learn to play some new songs.

And let’s not forget about the upcoming holidays! Oh, yeah, I foresee some good things will happen during the next week and a half. If nothing else, I won’t have much work for my university, and I’ll finally be able to go to a Magic: the Gathering session with my friends. I can’t believe it’s been more than a month since we last played MTG, plus, there’s a couple of stories I’ve been planning to write and publish on my blog since this summer, but haven’t got around doing it. Maybe I’ll finish writing them this time, we’ll see.

This is good in a way, since we have instant access to almost everything we need wherever we go, but what happens if we loose, misplace, or God forbid, someone steals our precious cellphone? In that case my friends, we’re on a roller-coaster that has a stinky pond as a final stop, in other words, we’d be better off losing our wallet.

But fear not, not everything is lost. Thankfully there exist programs that’ll help you find your lost/stolen electronic property and possibly even bring the thieves to justice. How do they work? Most smart phones have GPS technology, which can be used in conjunctions with the retrieval software to send information about the device’s location. If that’s not the case, it’s possible to define the phone’s location through signal strength analysis from the few nearest stations. It’s less precise, but nonetheless very helpful. But what about flash drives, cameras or even laptops? It gets a bit harder with those, but essentially, you receive the IP address of the computer they’ve been connected to, with which you can (usually it’s the police who does that), if you get a permit, obtain the postal address of the person it was used by at that time.

Most of such services require an annual fee to use their software, but there are some other alternatives you might want to consider as well. For example, JustStolen is a service set up by a group of police officers, that offers you a place to store your gadget’s serial identification number, which makes the process of finding the owner of stolen property quicker and easier.

On the bright side, I’ve finally sweeped off the dust off my guitar and started practicing again. After almost two years of hiatus I’m actually pleasantly surprised that I still remember all chords that I knew before and can find most of their scales without having to look them up. There is one downside though. My fingers aren’t used to the metallic strings of my acoustic guitar anymore, so the progress is quite slow. It’ll also take some time to regain my previous agility in changing chords and staying in rhythm, which is proving to be quite a pain in the ass right now.

The moving of mladi.net from lunarpages to a more reliable host is also something that is giving some variety and dynamics to this summer. Apparently it’ll be up to me to come up with a good design to replace the current one and to better reflect our movement to a completely new platform as well. I haven’t really done much web designing in my life, the one so far (planthefuture.info) sucks, and the promised redesign of Time Recursion appears to be stuck somewhere on an expedition in Himalaya, wearing only shorts, a t-shirt and some old, holey All-Star shoes. Though the concept I came up with so far, looks quite good in retrospect to everything else I’ve made up to now.

Oh, and there’s also “getting familiar with php-symfony” on my to-do list, so I can help my buddy with the new platform for the website.

Anyway, I’m at the University right now, just finished writing an exam, and am preparing for two more that are coming this Friday. My University appears to be outside the boundaries of my time bubble as-well, so I couldn’t anticipate the questions on the exam, which by the way had very little in common with what we’ve been studying during the year, which leads to my  diminished self-confidence about the forthcoming results of this test. But fear not! For there is still hope drifting through my veins, and I’m not ready yet to plead for mercy before the invincible and mighty number of doom (FYI, it’s 5). Have I already mentioned that I’m high on adrenaline right now? No? Well, apparently adrenaline is equal or greater than creativity, and leads to a fast incineration of calories, resulting in immediate hunger.

I’m out for a snack now, see you later.

Some of you, mostly those that are in Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics related studies have already met Wolfram Mathematica, a great piece of software that’s become quite indispensable in my every day’s life. And now, we can finally enjoy all of the beauties, functionality and computational power of its algorithms on the Internet, for free. But the awesomeness doesn’t stop here, it continues with the search engine’s capability to serve you some cold facts about countries, finances, cities, important personalities and even more, all enriched with additional charts and data to help you get what you want. The usefulness of WolframAlpha is so enormous, that there’s been already released a Firefox plugin, that let’s you integrate Wolfram’s search in your Google home page. Now what do you want more for a perfect browsing experience?

As good as it may seem, it gets even better. This is not the only newcomer on the scene in the past few weeks. A few days ago Google announced a new real-time interface called Google Wave, that is said to be available to public later this year. But what is it all about? Wave is essentially a clone of Facebook’s home page and twitter, but with a much more rich interface and a wider range of applicability. Basically it’s a place where your and your friends’ s e-mail, pictures, videos, music, maps and more will be merged in a time-wave, enabling you to engage in real time conversations.

In the past, almost twelve years, we’ve been witnessess to an endless massive campaigns promoting this game all around, showing us inside peaks, and promises of the upcoming release, to the point it all began to look like a bad hoax.

During this time, they’ve restarted the project countless times, changed and rechanged the base game engine and they still don’t have anything to show! And apparently it’s going to stay that way. Two days ago, 3dRealms, the studio that was making this game, announced their production will be shot down, because of funding problems. Though I’m of the opinion this is not the only reason for the termination of their work. Games are nowadays developed, usually and sadly in only about a year or two. This of course results in some initial bugs and unfinished features, but no game to date has taken so much time to develop as Duke Nukem, and still not showing anything. I, as a gamer would seriously expect some extraordinary features, unseen game play and revolutionary techniques present in a game that’s been in the works for more than a decade. I guess they didn’t make anything revolutionary so far and are just afraid to show their fans (if they’re still any left) nothing more than an ordinary game.

While the perception of my efforts towards the freshness of the contents of Time Recursion may seem to me quite frequent, the past week has been archived in my memory as one of the longest, and possibly the best I’ve had in the past years. It all starts with the last Saturday in April, with the Day of Youth Festival we had in my home city. I think there’s no need to further delve into the fact, that I’ve been among the group of youngsters organizing this great Catholic event. I know you’re burning with curiosity, so here you go, grab some pictures!

Apart from that, we had a nice trip to Ljubljana with my family in the middle of the week, accompanied by Nina, who joined us again yesterday for a walk in the gardens of the Miramare Castle and later on for a quite long, but refreshing talk.